Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too? by 6ixStringJack

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Wednesday, October 22, 2025 19:04
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Tuesday, October 21, 2025 6:22 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

George Santos is the perfect avatar of Trump's America

Perhaps the president was moved by Santos’ complaints, including some about solitary confinement. Or perhaps he simply fell for Santos’ flattery.

Santos’ loyalty seems to have helped secure his freedom less than three months into a seven-plus year sentence following the president’s commutation on Friday night. Santos pleaded guilty last year to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, a small portion of the misdeeds he has been accused of by former friends, colleagues, and enemies.

Explaining his decision, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Santos “has been horribly mistreated” and also “had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!” That first part is a stretch, given Santos’ own guilty plea. But it’s hard to argue with Santos’ loyalty.

In an open letter penned from prison and published just a few days before the commutation, the 37-year-old Santos made his commitment to the president explicit. “During my short tenure in Congress, I stood firmly behind your agenda,” Santos wrote. “You have always been a man of second chances, a leader who believes in redemption and renewal. I am asking you now, from the depths of my heart, to extend that same belief to me.”

Much more at https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/george-santos-free-man-ava
tar-trump-presidency-rcna238762

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, October 21, 2025 7:19 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Donald Trump Has Lost Touch With Reality

And it’s getting worse. When will we acknowledge the obvious?

By Paul Krugman | Oct 21, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/donald-trump-has-lost-touch-with

The other day I learned a new term: “AI sycophancy,” also sometimes called “chatbot sycophancy.”

I already knew about the phenomenon, having read stories about how Large Language Models flatter their users, telling them what they want to hear, assuring them that they’re always right. This self-reinforcement hooks into psychological vulnerabilities, potentially leading users to believe in their own brilliance, while shortcutting attempts by other human beings to insert some reality sense. A growing body of research shows that the use of generative AI – like social media but worse – is often damaging to users’ mental health. In the worst cases chatbot sycophancy has led to self-harm – even, allegedly, suicide.

But the way chatbots play with your mind isn’t new. Sycophancy has been sending people into delusional spirals and destructive behavior for millennia. In the past, however, sycophancy was reserved for the rich and powerful. AI’s innovation is to democratize the experience.

Being surrounded by actual human sycophants will inevitably happen if you are rich and powerful, unless you have the strength of character to avoid it. But, alas, we have as our president Donald Trump, who is a glutton for sycophancy. Moreover, he’s not alone: the tech-bro oligarchs – in particular, Musk, Andreesen, Zuckerberg, Ellison and Thiel – inhabit their own sycophancy bubbles, while also slavishly supporting Trump. Just read an excerpt from Jacob Silverman’s new, and highly recommended book, to understand the dynamic.

But while the tech bros can certainly make many people’s lives miserable, it takes the power of the presidency to threaten the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. And Trump is doing just that – he is descending into states of delusion that are as he would say, like nothing anyone has seen before (notwithstanding Nixon’s nighttime drunken tirades).

On Sunday, the day after millions of Americans marched in the massive No Kings Day protests, Trump dismissed them:

The demonstrations were very small, very ineffective and the people were whacked out. When you look at those people, those are not representative of the people of our country.

Does Trump actually believe that? I suspect that he does. In the grip of delusion, a powerful person will dismiss and destroy anything that challenges their self-aggrandizing alternate reality. This explains why there is no one in Trump’s inner circle who dares to tell him that his poll numbers are, indeed, very bad; or that it’s a bad look to commute George Santos’ prison sentence for fraud and identity theft. When people try to tell him things he doesn’t want to hear, he gets angry. A Credible sources say that Pam Bondi was reluctant to charge former FBI director James Comey given the flimsiness of the case. However, Trump made clear that this was non-negotiable — it was Comey or her. So Bondi saw to it that Comey was duly charged.

Another very recent example of Trump’s disconnect from reality was the temper tantrum he reportedly threw when meeting Volodymyr Zelenskyy, warning among other things that Putin “will destroy you” if he wants.

In reality, Putin has spent 3 years and 8 months trying as hard as he can to destroy Ukraine, without success. Dig a little deeper and you learn that Russia’s latest big offensive has been a bloody debacle: hundreds of thousands of soldiers’ lives lost without any significant strategic gains. You have to be seriously delusional to imagine that if Putin gets really, really angry he will suddenly develop the ability to blast through the “kill zone,” the deadly kilometers-wide no man’s land created by drones, precision artillery and mines that keeps bringing Russian offensives to grief.

But again, who’s going to brief Trump about his beloved Putin’s failures?

There are many, many more examples of Trump’s delusions. He really does seem to believe that Portland is “war-ravaged,” that Chicago is full of “beautiful Black women in MAGA hats” begging him to stop crime, that China is going to cave to his trade demands, that gasoline is $1.99 a gallon, that he will lower drug prices by 500%, and much more.

Granted, previous presidents have also been surrounded by flatterers. In the case of George W. Bush, it’s unlikely that we would have been lied into the Iraq War without Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz assuring him that we would be welcomed as liberators. And we know now that Biden’s inner circle hid his increasing physical frailty from the public and even from his own cabinet members.

Yet Trump’s disconnect from reality is uniquely destructive. No previous president has tried to overturn an election, sought to use the military against U.S. citizens, or sought to use the Justice Department as his own personal vendetta machine. The difference is that he’s the first president to live in an autocratic bubble, surrounded by a cult of personality within which nobody dares to criticize him, tell him uncomfortable truths or refuse to engage in blatantly illegal acts.

Furthermore, Trump is clearly getting worse, growing even more out of touch with each passing week. Regardless of whether it’s advancing age or growing frustration, even Trump, I think, realizes that his efforts to suppress all opposition are running into serious resistance. Putting out an AI video of himself dumping shit on protesters suggests panic, not strength. But his claims about what’s happening in America and the world keep getting stranger and wilder.

And Trump’s denial of reality is already having devastating consequences for America, with more to come. Watching Trump in action lately has had me remembering a passage from a classic George Orwell essay, “In front of your nose”:

[W]e are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, October 21, 2025 1:34 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump Fell Short on a Splashy Campaign Promise.

Trump’s IVF Move Is Kind of a Dud—and It Speaks Volumes About His Politics

By Jill Filipovic | Oct 21, 2025 5:40 AM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/10/trump-ivf-abortion-reprodu
ctive-rights-natalism.html

One of Donald Trump’s splashier campaign promises was that he would make in vitro fertilization free for all Americans. “Under the Trump administration, your government will pay for — or your insurance company will be mandated to pay for — all costs associated with IVF treatment,” the president said. “Because we want more babies, to put it nicely.”

After issuing a toothless executive order pledging to do something about IVF but not actually doing anything about IVF, the president has finally rolled out his plan. And despite much fanfare, the Trump IVF plan is a bit of a dud. It’s not nothing—it will modestly reduce IVF costs for some families—but it’s unlikely to meaningfully change the “Do we or don’t we” calculus for most people, and it’s nowhere near his “free” promise. It’s not even clear that the proposal will make much of a dent in costs for the families it does help. And it seems virtually guaranteed that the tiny IVF benefit on offer will not, as Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator and TV personality Mehmet Oz said, create “a lot of Trump babies.”

The first prong of the Trump IVF initiative isn’t a policy at all; it’s more or less the administration’s request that companies offer IVF benefits, just as some might provide dental plans to their employees. There is no mandate that companies offer IVF coverage. There is no penalty if they don’t. There are no government subsidies to offset the costs. There’s just the president saying, “Hey, guys, you should do this,” with a promise of a how-to to come.

The second is a bit more substantial but still small: an agreement with a single pharmaceutical company to decrease the cost of a single IVF drug, Gonal-F. The discounted drug will be sold through the Trump-branded https://trumprx.gov/ . The name itself is an abuse of Trump’s position, but at this point the public and press alike seem to have stopped caring.

“We’ll dramatically slash the cost of IVF and the treatment and many of the most common fertility drugs for countless millions of Americans,” Trump announced last week. “Prices are going way down, way, way down.” To be fair, “way, way down” is a matter of opinion. According to an estimate by Oz’s agency, patients pursuing IVF could save as much as $2,200 per cycle with the discounted drug. And although $2,200 is a significant amount, consider that a single cycle of IVF averages $15,000 to 20,000 and can cost as much as $30,000. Also, the estimated savings is as much as $2,200—meaning it will likely be far less for most people. When we’re talking about four-figure sums, $2,200 helps, but that number likely won’t make or break a person’s ability to undergo fertility treatments. That doesn’t mean it’s meaningless, and when you’re paying for exorbitantly expensive medical procedures, you’ll take any discount you can get. But a good start and a nice benefit is not the same as a life-changing policy that will lead to “many more beautiful American children,” as Trump pledged.

The IVF policy may not be groundbreaking, but it is perfectly Trumpian: a lot of big talk and bravado, without much in the way of substance behind it. The president and his administration are boasting that this benefit will fuel a Trump baby boom, but there’s no evidence that a single $2,200 drug is all that’s standing in the way of a fertility rate spike. With the IVF price tag being what it is, it’s frankly hard to imagine that this benefit will make the difference between getting IVF or skipping it for more than a tiny number of families, if any at all.

But as with so much of what Trump does, the result isn’t the point; the performance is. The president wants to be lauded and applauded, and apart from a tiny number of issues he genuinely seems to care about (kicking immigrants out of the country, imposing stiff penalties on enemies real and perceived, tariffs), he mostly wants to tell voters what he thinks they want to hear. This desire for approval and weakness for flattery make him highly malleable and easily influenced; it’s why his policy announcements are so confusing and shift so often. Making very loud promises allows him to give the impression of taking action, even if he changes his mind or fails to follow through. What Trump says—and voters hear—is “Trump is the first president to take meaningful action on IVF.” That the action isn’t all that meaningful doesn’t really matter.

And here again he seems to be playing both sides when it comes to reproductive rights and health. Trump has cobbled together a novel coalition. He remains a darling of the anti-abortion right—handing it Supreme Court justices that overturned Roe v. Wade and stripped American women of our constitutional right to abortion apparently has a long tail of goodwill—but seems to have little personal commitment to the issue himself. And he’s also now beholden to a motley crew of tech bros, pronatalists, and young men, many of whom are concerned about falling birth rates, a number of whom want children themselves but worry about costs or opportunities, and some of whom are gay and therefore likely reliant on IVF if they want to reproduce. The bro-natalists, and even many pronatalist abortion opponents, generally support IVF; some on the tech side also favor significant genetic testing to essentially maximize embryos not just for health but for things like intelligence and other characteristics, walking toward what feels to many on the anti-abortion right—and some on the left—like a designer-baby dystopia.

On the anti-abortion right, IVF is controversial, but Trump seems to get a special dispensation. There really is no way to square the now nearly ubiquitous anti-abortion view that life begins at conception with the reality that in many IVF procedures, more embryos are created than a couple will use and the leftover ones are eventually discarded. (Some people donate their embryos to other couples, but they are a small minority.) It is also common in IVF to screen embryos for genetic defects before implanting them and to discard those that are unlikely to result in a pregnancy or live birth. It’s hard to know exactly how many embryos are discarded through this process every year, but some estimates put it at well over a million—a significantly higher figure than the number of abortions. One would think that this would be a five-alarm fire for the anti-abortion movement, which claims that each of these embryos is a life equivalent to a born child, and certainly to an aborted fetus.

And yet we don’t tend to find “pro-life” protesters outside fertility clinics; we haven’t seen successful legislation banning IVF, although some anti-abortion extremists would certainly like to see it outlawed. When an Alabama court effectively criminalized IVF by declaring that state law asserted that life began at conception, many supposedly “pro-life” Republicans objected, Trump included. Many anti-abortion lawmakers continue to claim that life begins at conception but nevertheless support IVF, or at least ignore it—which kind of gives away the game that agitating against abortion is less about fetal or embryonic life than about controlling and punishing women.

Predictably, Trump has not seen much in the way of anti-abortion blowback from his IVF pledge. A smattering of vocal anti-abortion have extremists tittered on X, but the big anti-abortion organizations have stayed largely silent. His anti-abortion supporters, and even his anti-IVF supporters, seem happy to let him have a win on this—as long as he allows abortion bans, which radically constrain women’s rights and lives, to proceed apace.

That the anti-abortion movement has lined up behind the president, and continues to stand behind him, is one of the more revealing outcomes of the Trump era. It also reveals quite a bit about this latest IVF policy. If the policy were to significantly move the needle on IVF—to make it free, as Trump promised, or even reasonably affordable for most Americans—we might see bigger a “pro-life” backlash. But these groups know full well that although a small discount is nice, it’s far from a game changer. It lets Trump get some credit for supposedly expanding IVF access, while providing cover for the serious and increasingly deadly encroachments on women’s rights and lives that his presidency has wrought. Anti-abortion conservatives continue to make pregnancy much more dangerous for women in Republican-run states by banning abortion, not just making elective abortions harder to get but imperiling pregnant women’s lives when they have miscarriages or other complications. Trump’s head of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., says his agency is reviewing the safety of mifepristone, an abortion-inducing drug that has been on the market for decades, has been used and proved safe all across the world, and has a stronger safety record than Viagra and penicillin. But abortion opponents want it off the market, and because a national abortion ban is hugely unpopular, they’re going through the back door and using a specious “safety” pretext—and, so far, the Trump administration is going along with it.

It’s in this context that the president is touting his IVF policy. Voters hear the White House’s own summary and conclude that he’s doing a popular thing: supporting IVF so Americans can grow their families. Anti-abortion leaders are savvier, and they hear the true thing: Trump is getting outsize credit for his very modest IVF policy, which enables his administration to position itself as moderate on abortion and in favor of expanding reproductive rights—while, in reality, the administration remains beholden to the anti-abortion movement, and American women are seeing their rights curtailed and their lives diminished.

--------------

Like Trump, Hitler wanted a baby boom, too! Hotsy totsy, another Nazi.

On December 16, 1938, Adolf Hitler institutes the Mother’s Cross, to encourage women of "pure" German origin to increase the size of their families and grow the population of the Third Reich. A blue cross decorated with a swastika and Hitler’s engraved signature, the medal was given to women for birthing and raising children in three classes: Bronze (four to five children), Silver (six or seven children) and Gold (eight children or more).

The Nazis started such encouragement early. When members of the League of German Girls (a wing of the Hitler Youth movement) turned 18, they became eligible for a branch called Faith and Beauty, which trained these girls in the art of becoming ideal mothers. One component of that ideal was fecundity.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/december-16/hitler-institu
tes-the-mothers-cross

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, October 21, 2025 2:54 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Tuesday, October 21, 2025 5:07 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Trump administration, perhaps in acknowledgment of the potential backlash of leaving more than 70 million Social Security recipients in limbo, announced the BLS team will return to produce its report on Friday, Oct. 24, so that the 2026 cost-of-living increase can be announced the same day.

The administration’s initial attempt to use the shutdown to end reporting on the rate of inflation is just one example of how in President Donald Trump’s America, information that has been relied on for decades to make critical economic, scientific, environmental, public safety and health-related decisions has been disappearing — scrubbed from government websites or no longer collected because it doesn’t conform to the administration’s views.

It’s reminiscent of “1984,” George Orwell’s dystopian novel in which the fictitious Ministry of Truth altered historical records and discarded unwelcome data by disposing of it in “memory holes” where it was wiped out of existence. And in the novel, when individuals fell out of favor, they were made into “unpersons.”

In what can be seen as an uncanny real-world parallel, in 2025, government officials who have provided information contrary to the president’s perception of reality have been fired. This includes the head of the BLS, who provided unwanted employment data on a slowdown in the labor market, and the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, whose preliminary report about the limited impact of the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites contradicted Trump’s more grandiose claims.

https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/rcna238444

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, October 21, 2025 5:14 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Nobody is listening to your lies anymore.

How does it feel?

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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Tuesday, October 21, 2025 6:36 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Nobody is listening to your lies anymore.

How does it feel?

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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

Trumptards are confused and misunderstand the simplest concepts. I have dealt with Trumptards all my life, and not even one of them has good sense. Neither do you, 6ix. Here is a long story about Trump's handpicked lawyer, who is a complete nincompoop, just like you are, 6ixStringJack. Being highly articulate does NOT mean a Trumptard is smart.

This particular Trumptard-lawyer does NOT understand the concept of speaking off-the-record, nor does the Trumptard know what the limitations are on revealing grand jury testimony or who those limits apply to. The Trumptards are completely confused about the simplest things in the world:

“Anna, Lindsey Halligan Here.”

My Signal exchange with the interim U.S. attorney about the Letitia James grand jury.

By Anna Bower | Monday, October 20, 2025, 5:40 PM

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anna--lindsey-halligan-here

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, October 21, 2025 7:16 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Nobody is listening to your lies anymore.

How does it feel?

--------------------------------------------------

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
Trumptards

You can stop right there.

To do anything more than that is pointless in 2025.

--------------------------------------------------

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Tuesday, October 21, 2025 8:00 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

You can stop right there.

To do anything more than that is pointless in 2025.

Trump is asking the U.S. Department of Justice to pay him $230 million. When asked about it during an Oval Office event on Oct. 21, he remarked on the extraordinary nature of the president potentially overseeing a huge payout for himself from the government he runs.

"You know that decision would have to go across my desk," Trump said. "And it's awfully strange to make a decision where I'm paying myself."

Why not make it $230 billion instead of only $230 million? Trump is the President, so why not?

https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-doj-pay-230-million-previous-investiga
tions-sources/story?id=126731700

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, October 21, 2025 8:26 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

You can stop right there.

To do anything more than that is pointless in 2025.
Trump

You can stop right there.

To do anything more than that is pointless in 2025.

Unless you wanted to read the part out loud to the class that said:

Quote:
"It's interesting, because I'm the one that makes a decision, right?" Trump said. "And you know that decision would have to go across my desk, and it's awfully strange to make a decision where I'm paying myself. In other words, did you ever have one of those cases where you have to decide how much you're paying yourself in damages? But I was damaged very greatly, and any money that I would get, I would give to charity."

I think it's kind of funny that the figure is $230 Million.

That's almost exactly how much Nancy Pelosi and her husband scammed with insider trading since she got into politics.

It would be funny to know that she's watching Trump scam $230 Million from the US Government in a single afternoon when it took her an entire life to scam that much money... and then to see her face when he gives it all to Toys 4 Tots or some shit. To Nancy, that would be no different than if Trump lit the $230 Million on fire right in front of her.

Ahhhhh... to be a fly on the wall in the Pelosi Household.

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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Tuesday, October 21, 2025 8:43 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Is it okay for Trump to steal government money because he will give the money to "charity"? Like, charitably make the Trump ballroom attached to the White House bigger because space for only 999 guests is too small? Like, charitably make the Arc de Trump in DC 100 feet taller than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris?

Trump makes a claim: Somebody said, 'You're the third best president behind George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.' And I got extremely angry, hey, they didn't put out eight wars.

President Donald Trump couldn’t help but favorably compare himself to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in a rambling speech in the Rose Garden on Tuesday.

“Hey, they didn’t put out eight wars, nine coming,” he said. “We put out eight wars, and the ninth is coming, believe it or not.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-says-hes-got-abraham-lincol
n-and-george-washington-beat-as-president/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, October 21, 2025 8:56 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Is it okay for Trump to steal government money because he will give the money to "charity"?

Absolutely not. All of the above post was in jest.

This lawsuit started before Trump was elected for the 2nd time. He was wronged. I don't care what you have to say about it in 2025, but you and I both know very well that he was wronged.

Now he happens to be President.

It's an interesting situation for sure. I don't know what I would do right now if I were in his position. But I'll bet it's going to be funny, and it's going to be at your emotional expense.

In an alternate timeline you wish you were living in, Harris won and Trump is fighting this court case against the Liberal Dominance that finally died when Harris lost in our timeline. You'd all be laughing at him and calling him pathetic and anybody who said otherwise would just be silenced as they always were up until Election Day.

But now you're laughing at him and calling him pathetic and those words of yours are echoing harder than they ever had before because you've only recently realized how few people there actually are in your echo chamber when the entire Legacy Media isn't in lock-step with them.

--------------------------------------------------

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Tuesday, October 21, 2025 9:20 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:

John Brennan Hit With Criminal Referral Over Steele Dossier Lies

Tuesday, Oct 21, 2025 - 02:59 PM

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan on Tuesday referred former CIA director John Brennan to the Justice Department for prosecution, alleging that Brennan made false statements to Congress about how the 2017 intelligence assessment on Russian election interference handled material from the so-called Steele dossier.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Wednesday, October 22, 2025 6:15 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Is it okay for Trump to steal government money because he will give the money to "charity"?

Absolutely not. All of the above post was in jest.

This lawsuit started before Trump was elected for the 2nd time. He was wronged. I don't care what you have to say about it in 2025, but you and I both know very well that he was wronged.

Now he happens to be President.

It's an interesting situation for sure. I don't know what I would do right now if I were in his position. But I'll bet it's going to be funny, and it's going to be at your emotional expense.

In an alternate timeline you wish you were living in, Harris won and Trump is fighting this court case against the Liberal Dominance that finally died when Harris lost in our timeline. You'd all be laughing at him and calling him pathetic and anybody who said otherwise would just be silenced as they always were up until Election Day.

But now you're laughing at him and calling him pathetic and those words of yours are echoing harder than they ever had before because you've only recently realized how few people there actually are in your echo chamber when the entire Legacy Media isn't in lock-step with them.

In an alternate universe, Trump does not receive $billions in bribes for Presidential favors: Forbes reported a net worth of $7.3 billion for Trump as of its September 2025 update. This marks a $3 billion increase over the past year, primarily fueled by cryptocurrency and real estate licensing ventures.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2025/09/09/presidency-boosts
-trumps-net-worth-by-3-billion-in-a-year/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, October 22, 2025 6:20 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

More than 420 anti-science bills attacking longstanding public health protections – vaccines, milk safety and fluoride – have been introduced in statehouses across the U.S. this year, part of an organized, politically savvy campaign to enshrine a conspiracy theory-driven agenda into law.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is pushing the wave of legislation. The effort would strip away protections that have been built over a century.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/anti-science-bills-hit-statehouses
-attacking-longstanding-public-health-protections

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, October 22, 2025 6:41 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

So are we in what Phil Gramm — remember him? — once called a “mental recession,” a sort of mass delusion that the economy is bad? It’s likely that some of Americans’ sour mood is driven by political unease. Huge and ever-changing tariffs, masked agents grabbing people off the street, assassinations, vindictive prosecutions, rising measles cases, Trump’s false claims that cities are “war zones” as pretext for sending in the National Guard, and more. Increasingly unhinged statements from the administration feed a general sense of destructive instability. Next thing you know they’ll start demolishing the White House itself to make room for some vanity project. Oh, wait.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-us-economy-is-in-worse-shape

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, October 22, 2025 6:46 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Is it okay for Trump to steal government money because he will give the money to "charity"?

Absolutely not. All of the above post was in jest.

This lawsuit started before Trump was elected for the 2nd time. He was wronged. I don't care what you have to say about it in 2025, but you and I both know very well that he was wronged.

Now he happens to be President.

It's an interesting situation for sure. I don't know what I would do right now if I were in his position. But I'll bet it's going to be funny, and it's going to be at your emotional expense.

In an alternate timeline you wish you were living in, Harris won and Trump is fighting this court case against the Liberal Dominance that finally died when Harris lost in our timeline. You'd all be laughing at him and calling him pathetic and anybody who said otherwise would just be silenced as they always were up until Election Day.

But now you're laughing at him and calling him pathetic and those words of yours are echoing harder than they ever had before because you've only recently realized how few people there actually are in your echo chamber when the entire Legacy Media isn't in lock-step with them.
In an alternate universe, Trump does not receive $billions in bribes for Presidential favors: Forbes reported a net worth of $7.3 billion for Trump as of its September 2025 update. This marks a $3 billion increase over the past year, primarily fueled by cryptocurrency and real estate licensing ventures.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2025/09/09/presidency-boosts
-trumps-net-worth-by-3-billion-in-a-year/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Shut up, faggot.

Get a hobby.

--------------------------------------------------

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Wednesday, October 22, 2025 6:48 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
So are we in what Phil Gramm — remember him? — once called a “mental recession,” a sort of mass delusion that the economy is bad? It’s likely that some of Americans’ sour mood is driven by political unease. Huge and ever-changing tariffs, masked agents grabbing people off the street, assassinations, vindictive prosecutions, rising measles cases, Trump’s false claims that cities are “war zones” as pretext for sending in the National Guard, and more. Increasingly unhinged statements from the administration feed a general sense of destructive instability. Next thing you know they’ll start demolishing the White House itself to make room for some vanity project. Oh, wait.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-us-economy-is-in-worse-shape

Paul Krugman is either a bold faced liar, or he has set himself up so well that he has absolutely no idea what reality is anymore.

--------------------------------------------------

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Wednesday, October 22, 2025 6:52 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Paul Krugman is either a bold faced liar, or he has set himself up so well that he has absolutely no idea what reality is anymore.

Why are you unemployed, 6ix? Because you are erratic. Trump’s wildly erratic policies are creating huge uncertainty which is deterring many companies – essentially those that are not in the AI sector or a sector catering to the affluent – from making investments. And those forgone investments include hiring new workers. The result is that much of the economy is frozen — companies aren’t hiring or investing. This freeze, in turn, explains both worker anxiety and rising inequality. Without the AI boom/bubble spending, we might very well have fallen into a recession, as some economists like Mark Zandi have claimed. And despite the AI boom, times for many workers are tough.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, October 22, 2025 6:57 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Orwellian Idea That Prompted a Whole Movie

By Shirley Li | October 21, 2025, 12:50 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2025/10/george-orwell-1984-documen
tary-raoul-peck/684637/

George Orwell was dying when he wrote 1984 in the late 1940s on the desolate Isle of Jura in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. Tuberculosis ravaged his body, and typing thousands of words a day only weakened him further. His skin flaked off. Blisters burst across his throat. Feverish and emaciated, he endured painful procedures to support his failing lungs, but the treatments were too late. Eventually, in 1950, Orwell succumbed to the disease.

Close-ups of microscopic tuberculosis bacteria fill the screen in the opening minutes of the documentary Orwell: 2+2=5—images as bold and unnerving as what follows. Directed by the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Raoul Peck, the film examines an idea popularized by 1984: that blatant falsehoods can, through propaganda, be accepted as truth. That conceit, along with Orwell’s state of mind during his final months, has been scrutinized for decades—by high-school students, biographers, and other documentarians. But Peck builds out a bigger argument, using material provided by the Orwell estate—including the writer’s letters, essays, and diary entries—to trace the authoritarian tactics that can suppress truth and lay out what he sees as a disturbing pattern: one of wide-scale complacency in the decades after Orwell’s death. Generations of readers have recognized the prescient warnings of 1984. Yet according to Peck’s film, recognizing that reality can resemble Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece has led to numbness, rather than meaningful change.

The tuberculosis-bacteria motif underscores this idea. To compare authoritarianism’s rise to an infection is perhaps obvious. But as the microbes spread across the screen, the visual becomes almost hypnotic—and, as Peck recently told me, akin to how dictators overwhelm people’s abilities to determine fact from fiction. “It’s the same story again and again,” he said, “and we don’t learn.”

Peck grew up under multiple authoritarian regimes. At 8 years old, he and his family fled Haiti after François Duvalier, the dictator known as Papa Doc, began his rule. Around the same time that his family moved to the Republic of the Congo, that country’s first democratically elected prime minister was assassinated; the following coup placed the despot Mobutu Sese Seko in power. To Peck, Papa Doc and Mobutu followed the same playbook: “They attack intelligence, they attack universities, they attack science, they attack the press,” he said. “They attack every institution that can be a bulwark against them.”

Those memories shaped Peck’s approach to Orwell: 2+2=5. A more traditional exploration of Orwell’s fiction might turn to interviews with scholars of his work to unpack his resonance. Peck instead explores the idea cinematically, as he did in I Am Not Your Negro, his 2016 deconstruction of James Baldwin’s work: He creates an impressionistic collage, featuring scenes derived mostly from Orwell’s writings—which are recited by the actor Damian Lewis—or from relevant archival footage.

The documentary, Peck said, is intended to convey his frustration that Orwell’s name has too often been flattened into an adjective, and 1984 into mere speculative fiction. In one scene from Orwell: 2+2=5, Apple’s well-known Super Bowl ad—in which a model hurls a sledgehammer at a Big Brother broadcast—plays on a giant billboard above a busy street as passersby completely ignore it. Perhaps in an effort to unflatten Orwell’s warnings, the film points out what it sees as contemporary parallels to Newspeak, the uncanny English used throughout 1984 to prevent the articulation of abstract concepts. (Rather than say something is “great,” Newspeak uses the word plusgood. A more insidious example would be calling any ideas that go against the ruling party “thoughtcrime.”) Peck argues that some world leaders have seemed to embrace the practice of twisting words: In one sequence, he displays a modern glossary of terms—peacekeeping operations, campaign finance, illegals—that he implies obfuscate thornier realities.

While constructing the documentary, Peck thought of Orwell as “a fighting companion,” he told me—a guide rather than an encyclopedia of insights to pull from. He structured the film according to the three tenets of the ruling government in 1984: “War is peace,” “Ignorance is strength,” and “Freedom is slavery.” Then he found pointed visuals to illustrate those ideas. A clip of George W. Bush declaring war on Iraq, for instance, rolls as the first chapter begins, to emphasize how even nontotalitarian countries can use conflict to stoke nationalistic fervor. A graphic charting the slew of banned books in the United States illustrates the power of ignorance, while a montage of security cameras in public spaces underlines the notion of freedom as an illusion. Peck also adds newsreels of world leaders delivering speeches, footage of war zones past and present, and scenes from futuristic Hollywood films, to emphasize the reach of Orwell’s ideas throughout time.

The film, as a result, can feel overstuffed. But even when he incorporates discordant images, Peck keeps a close eye on Orwell’s vision. For example, he uses AI-generated art during some sequences about the misuse of technological innovation; the moments come off as jarring at first, but they successfully evoke Orwell’s description in 1984 of a world in which records and books are produced “without any human intervention.” And the ending of Orwell: 2+2=5, in which Peck knits together recordings of protests—of Russian citizens lining up outside the dissident Alexei Navalny’s funeral, of women demonstrating over the death of Mahsa Amini in Iran—brought to my mind a line from Orwell’s essay “Why I Write”: “The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.”

Peck told me that he resisted noting every parallel he saw between Orwell’s words and today’s reality, because he didn’t want to turn the documentary into an ongoing history lesson. (To go into the editing bay and, say, incorporate news reports of the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel being taken off air “would be the trap,” he told me.) If anything, Peck hoped that the film’s density and wide scope would illuminate how frequently the past’s most painful moments repeat themselves. Knowing that many dictators have come to power through familiar means isn’t enough to stop them, the film argues; a democratic system needs “to be renewed and reinforced every day,” Peck said, through a commitment to truth. Such pursuits may be the only way to shake off intellectual paralysis—the only way to remember what 2+2 actually equates.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, October 22, 2025 11:39 AM

THG

Keep it real please

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Paul Krugman is either a bold faced liar, or he has set himself up so well that he has absolutely no idea what reality is anymore.
Why are you unemployed, 6ix? Because you are erratic. Trump’s wildly erratic policies are creating huge uncertainty which is deterring many companies – essentially those that are not in the AI sector or a sector catering to the affluent – from making investments. And those forgone investments include hiring new workers. The result is that much of the economy is frozen — companies aren’t hiring or investing. This freeze, in turn, explains both worker anxiety and rising inequality. Without the AI boom/bubble spending, we might very well have fallen into a recession, as some economists like Mark Zandi have claimed. And despite the AI boom, times for many workers are tough.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump is literally tearing down the White House. No Russian or European leader ever, ever, were sick enough to tear down any Historic building like this. Instead, they did everything in their power to protect those buildings.

We have protected Historic properties all across this nation for this very reason. Trump is sickening.

For years in these threads comrade signym had a signature that said America is ruled by oligarchs. She intended it as an insult against this country. Now with Trump that was never truer.

Where is signyms outrage? It turns out she's all in when it comes to oligarchs ruling the country. Not running the country, ruling the country. Isn't that right comrade.

T

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Wednesday, October 22, 2025 4:12 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Shut up, faggot. Go to BlueSky and cry with your endangered species.

--------------------------------------------------

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Wednesday, October 22, 2025 4:46 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

“Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?”

https://coming42.livejournal.com/479179.html

A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.

Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.

Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers. And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.

There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface. Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist. Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.

And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down.

So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:

• Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.

• You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.

This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss. After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart. In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.

And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish: ‘My God… what… have… I… created?’ If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, October 22, 2025 6:18 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
“Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?”

I'm sure it's for the same reason that some Americans hate Trump.

They're wackjob Liberal shitheels with no life, just like you.

--------------------------------------------------

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Wednesday, October 22, 2025 7:04 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
“Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?”

I'm sure it's for the same reason that some Americans hate Trump.

They're wackjob Liberal shitheels with no life, just like you.

The Real Target of Trump’s War on Drug Boats

The Administration has blown up seven vessels in the Caribbean in recent weeks, but the President has been pushing for more dramatic military action in Latin America since his first term.

By Jonathan Blitzer | October 21, 2025

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-real-target-of-trumps-war-
on-drug-boats

Late this summer, James Story, who served as U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela for three years of Donald Trump’s first term and for two of Joe Biden’s, felt that anything was possible in the relationship between Washington and Caracas. It had been six years since the U.S. closed its Embassy in Venezuela, to protest the rule of the Socialist authoritarian Nicolás Maduro. The issue of how to dislodge Maduro’s regime has been an American political conundrum for at least a decade. Trump had wanted to overthrow it but couldn’t figure out how; Biden tried to find compromise, in large part because of a steady exodus of Venezuelan migrants coming to the U.S. But Maduro remained in power, despite appearing to have lost elections handily last year. “If you had asked me two months ago,” Story said, “I would have said it’s equally likely that we reopen the Embassy and restore some kind of relation as it is that we would bomb them.”

Since September 2nd, the Trump Administration has attacked seven boats off the coast of Venezuela, killing at least thirty-two people, on the grounds that they were drug traffickers transporting contraband to the U.S. The President has justified the strikes as a matter of national self-defense, claiming, without evidence, that drugs from the region are responsible for three hundred thousand deaths in the U.S. last year. “To every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States of America, please be warned that we will blow you out of existence,” Trump said at the United Nations last month. “Each boat that we sink carries drugs that would kill more than twenty-five thousand Americans.” There were about eighty thousand drug-overdose deaths in the U.S. last year. Fentanyl, which was responsible for the overwhelming majority of them, doesn’t come from Venezuela, and the Coast Guard has no record of seizing it in the Caribbean.

In late September, the White House sent a notification to Congress declaring that the U.S. was in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, which the government has designated as “terrorist organizations.” Those it killed in international waters were deemed “unlawful combatants.” In an escalation of hostilities against Venezuela, the Department of Defense has recently moved some ten thousand troops into the region, mostly to former military bases in Puerto Rico. Eight American warships and a submarine are now in the Caribbean, and, according to the Times, the Trump Administration has secretly authorized the C.I.A. to conduct covert actions inside Venezuela. Last week, Alvin Holsey, the admiral in charge of the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees all military operations in Central and South America, abruptly resigned; the job is typically held for three years, but he had served for less than one.

Legal scholars and experts in the history of executive power have expressed alarm that Trump is acting well beyond the limits of national and international law. But, earlier this month, when Senate Democrats introduced a resolution to curb Trump’s ability to strike narco-traffickers without congressional approval, it failed on largely partisan lines. “This is basically U.S. propaganda through force,” a former senior national-security official who served in the first Trump White House told me. “This is not a counter-narcotics mission. It’s using a ten-ton truck to kill an ant.”

Venezuela’s Socialist government has, for years, propped up other leftist leaders across the region, chiefly in Cuba. There is a clear electoral constituency in South Florida, a vital Republican stronghold, that has opposed Maduro and demanded American action against his government. “If you solve the Venezuela problem, you get three for the price of one,” a state Republican operative told me in 2019. “You’ll make the Colombians, Nicaraguans, and Cubans in Florida very happy.” In 2019, Trump recognized Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the de-facto President of the country. But Guaidó was eventually sidelined in Miami, where he remains in exile. When Trump issued threats against Maduro, in the lead-up to the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, the intended audience included voters in South Florida and military officials in Caracas, who, the theory went, might be encouraged to break ranks if they felt the Americans would come to their aid. “Plan A was that the military would come in and save the day,” Frank Mora, a former Ambassador to the Organization of American States, told me at the time. “They don’t have a Plan B or C.”

Shortly after Trump was sworn in for his second term, he signed an executive order that labelled the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, along with several Mexican drug cartels, “foreign terrorist organizations.” In the case of Tren de Aragua, the White House made an argument that U.S. intelligence agencies largely disputed: namely, that Maduro was conspiring with the gang to smuggle drugs into the U.S. and spread crime through mass migration. In March, Trump authorized the government, under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to transfer suspected Tren de Aragua members to a prison in El Salvador without due process. Of the two hundred and fifty-two men sent to El Salvador, the vast majority had no criminal record; many were either in the U.S. lawfully or had pending immigration cases. In July, after months of detention, which included routine beatings and other mistreatment, the men were released to Venezuela in a prisoner exchange. Three weeks later, the Administration doubled, to fifty million dollars, an existing bounty on Maduro that stemmed from a “narcoterrorism” case brought against him by the Justice Department in 2020.

Since January, two factions within the current Administration have been in open conflict over how to handle Maduro. One of them, led by Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State and acting national-security adviser, wanted regime change or, short of that, a policy of increased sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and further threats. Richard Grenell, the President’s envoy for “special missions,” represented the other, more conciliatory camp on the Venezuela issue. In January, Grenell travelled to Caracas to meet with Maduro. They held discreet negotiations over releasing Americans who’d been held in Venezuelan prisons and potentially easing restrictions on the country’s oil exports, which the Biden Administration had begun to do. One notable result of such diplomacy was that Venezuela started to accept deportees from the U.S., something the Maduro government had resisted for years. “Grenell was kind of doing a replay of some of the stuff that happened under Biden,” Story said. “Then you had Rubio coming in, saying, ‘No, we’re applying maximum pressure and we’re going to take that maximum pressure even further.’ ” By the summer, Story said, the Administration “had two very different approaches simultaneously.”

In August, however, the hard-liners began to win out, according to someone with knowledge of the Administration’s internal deliberations. The shift seemed to mark a victory for Rubio. But the change didn’t reflect Rubio’s influence so much as the involvement of a new player in the policy fight: Stephen Miller, the President’s deputy chief of staff and the head of the White House Homeland Security Council. “Miller sided with Rubio not because of regime change,” the source told me. Rather, it was because Venezuela presented “an outlet for the belief that the President can just kill these guys” as part of an open-ended war on drugs and crime. “Stephen is a lot of the energy behind the bombings,” the source said. “He is owning the Western Hemisphere portfolio: immigration, security issues, and going after the cartels. He convenes working groups almost every day. He’s been very top-down with the Department of Defense about what he wants to see. Hegseth’s team just says ‘yes.’ They don’t push back. Miller got told no for similar stuff in the first term. He doesn’t have people there to say ‘No, this isn’t a good idea’ anymore.”

For Miller, the military strikes help expand the President’s power, while also reinforcing the narrative of Venezuelan immigrants as “alien enemies.” As a former Trump Administration official put it, “this just feels like the militarization of domestic policy. How do you stay in power? You create an ‘other.’ You say that we’re under attack. You create a casus belli. You blame the other for everything. This is happening while you have the deployment of National Guardsmen to cities. You’re getting people used to these kinds of actions. This is expanding the definition of the use of force.”

The implications of Trump’s use of the military, the former White House official said, are not lost on other Latin American countries, either. “If you’re Panama, you think this is about you. If you’re Colombia, you think it’s about you,” he told me. “You prove to the Mexicans that you’ll do what you say. The Brazilians thought this was about them. If you think it’s a signal, it is a signal.”

In Trump’s first term, he asked his advisers whether the U.S. could conduct military strikes against Mexico, based on the premise that the country was principally to blame for America’s drug problems. “They don’t have control of their own country,” Trump told Mark Esper, his previous Secretary of Defense. As Esper later wrote in a memoir, Trump had repeatedly asked if he could “shoot missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs,” and proposed that, if necessary, it could be done “quietly.” “No one would know it was us,” Trump reportedly said.

Trump was ultimately forced to relent after staunch opposition from the Department of Defense: the Mexican government was the U.S.’s largest trade partner and a muscular ally in limiting the spread of regional migration. By the start of 2023, though, the prospect of drastic action was becoming an increasingly mainstream position in the Republican Party. G.O.P. lawmakers in the House introduced, but failed to pass, an authorization for the use of military force against cartels, and they argued that the federal government should designate them as foreign terrorist organizations. Adding Tren de Aragua to this particular cause was a by-product of the 2024 Presidential campaign. In August, after a video from a housing complex in Aurora, Colorado, went viral, showing armed men alleged to belong to the gang, Trump began talking about the group constantly.

Once he was back in office, Trump wanted to see more dramatic military action on the international stage. “There’s been an urge, an energy to do something aggressive and different,” the person with knowledge of the Administration told me. “It had to go somewhere. We were going to start killing cartel members. But there was a feeling that if we started to go kinetic in Mexico then that would have second- and third-order consequences that would be bad.”

The Mexican government, for its part, was being quietly coöperative at the border, and the country’s President, Claudia Sheinbaum, was managing to balance public opposition to Trump with greater flexibility in private. Venezuela, by contrast, was an obvious target. “There wasn’t a direct risk because Venezuela isn’t on our border,” the person said. Maduro has viciously attacked political opponents and presided over the country’s economic collapse. During the past decade, nearly eight million people have fled. On October 10th, the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She promptly dedicated it to Trump, whom she’s been trying to enlist for years to oust Maduro. “We all know that the head of Tren de Aragua is Maduro,” Machado told Donald Trump, Jr., on his podcast in February. “The regime has created, promoted, and financed Tren de Aragua.” Under Maduro, she added, the country has become a “refuge for terrorists, drug cartels, and groups like Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and China.”

When the U.S. struck the first Venezuelan boat, in September, one detail immediately caught the attention of former government officials: eleven people were said to have been on board. In drug-running operations, it is highly unusual for so many passengers to be on a single vessel. “There’s almost always three or four: a navigator, a pilot, and a person to put gas in the boat,” Story told me. “There are never eleven people on a drug boat because each person is drugs that you can’t transport.”

It was possible that some men on the boat were involved in trafficking and that others were simply hitching a ride. The boat was intercepted off the northern coast of Venezuela, near a small fishing town called San Juan de Unare, which, in the past two decades, has become a transit point for the smuggling of cocaine and marijuana. One Venezuelan woman told the Times that her husband, a fisherman, left for work and never returned. In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, the families of the men killed posted testimonials on social-media accounts. But the Venezuelan government, for reasons that remain unclear, appears to have pressured them to take down their accounts. “This is the problem with the situation,” Ronna Rísquez, a Venezuelan crime journalist, told me. “Both governments”—the U.S. and Venezuela—“like to lie.”

The other vessels struck by the U.S.—five speedboats and a semi-submersible—have had fewer passengers, but they were said to have been intercepted in coastal areas that are not typically associated with large-scale drug smuggling. According to Gustavo Petro, the President of Colombia, a Colombian fisherman was killed in one of the strikes, in mid-September. “U.S. government officials have committed a murder and violated our sovereignty in territorial waters,” he said. After another bombing, late last week, the U.S. Navy apprehended two survivors whom Trump later said were citizens of Colombia and Ecuador. On Saturday, he announced that they would be repatriated. Had they remained in U.S. custody, as the first to be captured under the new “armed conflict” against international cartels, it would have brought legal scrutiny to Trump’s whole gambit, either by a military tribunal or a civilian court. Apparently, this wasn’t yet worth the risk.

The Trump Administration has shared videos of the bombings, but it has failed to provide any additional evidence that the targets were, in fact, drug traffickers. Such evasiveness, in some ways, is almost a secondary concern. The more pressing question, which the Administration has most adamantly refused to answer, is why it is attacking these boats when merely intercepting them, in accordance with past practice, could help avoid a wider war. If the U.S. could return the survivors of the last strike to their home countries, for potential prosecution there, what was the rationale for trying to kill them and others in the first place?

Last week, after the Times reported that the Administration had rejected a diplomatic overture from Maduro, in which he offered up his country’s oil and mineral deposits to U.S. companies, I asked the former White House official if it was far-fetched to imagine an actual U.S. invasion of Venezuela. His answer, for now, was yes. “A real all-out invasion requires probably sixty thousand more ground forces than what we currently have,” he said. “That is not to say that Trump wouldn’t agree to some attention-getting operation or presence. That’s more his style.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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